The other day Lath mused on how guild’s run their guild bank and make money, and asked for people to share how their guild does things. Being the “banker” for Monolith I thought I’d share a bit on how we built our guild bank and what we do with the funds that the bank holds!

How Monolith Makes Money

Our guild bank is fully self-sustaining. That is to say that we don’t ask/force people to contribute into the guild bank. If we are ever short on anything, and there is a short in the AH for those items, we will ask people who want to make a little extra gold to CoD items to our bank mule and we will buy them from our guild mates. Our main source of income, since back in the days of SSC, has been to sell BoE epic items. We first started doing this with the rare patterns from SSC and TK. We would craft them and transfer some over to the alliance side to sell, and keep some on the horde side to sell, so that we built up resources on both factions to be able to take advantage of both auction houses.

Throughout that expansion and this, we have continued to fund our guild bank via the selling of BoE epics to the realm. We also sell patterns that drop and are BoE, along with the reagents for the patterns (i.e. orbs) once our guild has made use of all of the ones they need, and we start stacking a surplus of them. This working of the Auction House has been our sole source of income for the guild since the start of TBC. It has worked fairly well for us, and we have a fairly healthy guild bank as a result. One of the things that I think makes our BoE endeavors successful is that we are reasonable for the prices that we sell them. We try to logically think about what the item is worth, what we think someone would pay for it without balking, and then list the item for a fair amount. Sometimes perhaps I underprice things, based on how fast the item sells, but I also rarely have things that stack up and I have to relist a dozen times to sell.

Sometimes, we also just do a “bargain basement” run of things in the guild bank. A good example of this was all of the epic patterns from Ulduar and ToC. As ICC was released, the value of those patterns significantly dropped, yet we still had rows upon rows of them in the bank. So, I went to the AH, and had a “clearance” sale. Most of them were picked up quite quickly, and all of those 400-600g sales added up to a tidy profit for some older content gear patterns :) Then again, who can resist a sale?!?

What The Bank Offers

Fish feasts for all 4 of our raid nights

4-5 flasks per week

We offer abyss crystals to anyone who has received an upgrade and needs enchants.

We pay for the crafting of any unique gear required for an encounter (i.e. frost resist gear, shadow resist gear)

We provide dps potions for encounters where they are crucial (i.e. Hodir Hard Mode, while learning)

We provide any unique potions that are required for an encounter (i.e. purification potions and fire potions for Archimonde, shadow resist potions for Mother S)

We have provided the materials for all of our engineers to craft a Jeeves

We were able to purchase a significant amount of Saronite for our Shadowmourne wielders, to get them started on their quest

On back to back progression nights, we sometimes make guild repairs available.

We try to make sure that our guild bank is funded enough to provide all of these things. We want to make sure that if we some to a fight like Mother Sharaz where the entire guild needs to be decked out in Shadow Resist gear that we have the resources to make that happen. We want to make sure that we have the gold every week to provide flasks to the guild for progression content, to help alleviate some of the “prep” time involved in raiding.

We have all 6 guild bank tabs. 3 are viewable by the guild, and contain herbs, reagents for crafting and our abyss crystals. 3 are officer only tabs. 1 is the officer tab where we house BoEs, patterns, orbs, etc. One is a “raid potions” tab where things like wild magic potions and haste potions are stored, and one is a “flasks” tab where frost lotus and flasks are kept. The last two are only kept closed so that I don’t have to sort through all of the junk that may be placed into them, and can keep them neat and orderly (although…I wonder if there is a “view” only option, and people cannot deposit items into those tabs *ponders*).

Something Unique We Have Recently Done

As we cleared through ICC, every last person in our raid that could pick up the quest for shadowmourne had looted Festergut and Rotface’s blood, and we were letting them rot on the corpses. Since our GDKP run on the horde side hadnt’ yet killed them (and still hasn’t gotten rotface, I believe), there was almost no way to obtain the blood outside of being in a guild that could kill them. So, we discussed it and decided to open up our raid to the server, for people to purchase the blood from us, at what we felt to be a fair cost.

Each week that someone comes in and purchases the blood, we deposit the funds into the large guild bank, and then for that week we turn on guild bank repairs for our progression raid nights, which right now is working on The Lich King (yay, for making it to phase 5 on Monday!).

This has actually worked out really well for us. Nobody has to spend anything but their time and a few potions for our progression raids, and I feel that it’s cut a lot of stress out of what is already a stressful encounter. When people aren’t worried about how much gold person X just cost them for shitting a defile in the center of the raid, tension is down a little bit (although still there!).

We will keep offering this option to the server until interest is non-existant, or until we get started on the hard modes of those two bosses, and it is no longer feasible to let someone into our raids to loot the items.

Overall I think that the guild bank system we have set up works well. Will we change it with Cataclysm? I’m not sure! I suppose it depends on what “Guild Leveling” talents are available :)

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